the
City.

An hour later he arrived at his club. By this time the spell which the
interview with Olive had cast over him had lost some of its power.
Doubts began to arise, fears came into his heart. He was no longer sure
of himself or of her. As the excitement passed away, the old longing for
whisky came back to him. He was on the point of ordering it when he
remembered what he had said to Olive.

"She has not yet promised you," said temptation. "Indulge freely while
you may. You will be breaking no promise." He stretched out his hand to
ring a bell, but as quickly withdrew it.

"No," he said, "I should be ashamed to meet her again if I did. I'll not
be such a weak thing as that."

He scarcely slept that night. Hope and fear, joy and despair alternately
possessed him, and in his darker hours the craving for drink dogged him.
Once he went so far as to take a bottle of whisky from a cupboard, but
when he realised what he was doing he opened the window and poured the
contents into the street. Never in his whole life had a night seemed so
long. Again and again did he switch on the electric light and try to
read, only to throw one book after another from him in anger and
weariness. When morning at length came, it brought no comfort. What had
given him hope and joy the day before only filled his mind with doubt
now. Besides, every fibre of his drink-sodden nature cried out for
satisfaction. Life became almost unbearable.

"It's this uncertainty," he said. "If she had said yes, I could drive
the craving from me as such an accursed thing should be driven, but
while I am in doubt I seem like a feather in the wind."

As the thought passed through his mind, the humour of the situation
possessed him. He laughed at himself. He, Radford Leicester, who for
years had despised women, was now admitting that his whole future
depended on the single word of one of the despised sex. What would his
acquaintances say? This reminded him of Purvis and Sprague, and of the
compact they had made, and then he felt like laughing no more. What if
they should ever divulge what had taken place between them!

He seized a telegraph form, and wrote quickly: "_Expect me to-night at
six. Leicester._" This dispatch he addressed to Olive Castlemaine, and
after that he became more calm. It seemed to form another link between
him and the woman he loved. He spent the morning in answering letters
which had come from his constituency, and then, after lunch,